Category:History

Understanding the past to know the way forward. See also Eco-heroes (especially Eco-Elders), as well as Globalization and See also Economics, Colonialism, Food Scarcity, Labor history, as well as Africa and Third World Development as well as Population and Food History. Counter-History

The Big Picture

Earth Days is a fantastic history of the American Environmental Movement. ****

"A Fierce Green Fire" video documentery traces the history of the modern environmental movement, chronicling dramatic battles like the Sierra Club's fight against dams in the Grand Canyon, Greenpeace's campaign to save whales and recent efforts to combat climate change. San Francisco-based director Mark Kitchell, who also made the Academy Award-nominated "Berkeley in the Sixties," (audio interview).

Timeline.

Slideshow of the American Environmental Movement.

Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment By Joy Palmer, David Edward Cooper, Peter Blaze Corcoran

List of history research sources.

David Christian teaches an ambitious world history course that tells the tale of the entire universe -- from the Big Bang 13 billion years ago to present day. TEDtalk video.

World History

Collapse *** by Jared Diamond, (celebrated author of Guns, Germs and Steel) seeks to understand why so many civilizations have been unable to avoid destroying the environment they depended upon. In this selection he summaries the reasons, which may also be involved in your issue. TEDtalk video.

Complex civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists including Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” Charles L. Redman in “Human Impact on Ancient Environments” and Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have laid out the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. The difference this time is that when we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will, with this final collapse, be no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations to conquer, no new peoples to subjugate. The long struggle between the human species and the Earth will conclude with the remnants of the human species learning a painful lesson about unrestrained greed and self-worship. More.

This Borrowed Earth: Lessons from the Fifteen Worst Environmental Disasters around the World 2010 by Robert Emmet Hernan : "Over the last century mankind has irrevocably damaged the environment through he unscrupulous greed of big business and our own willful ignorance. Here are the strikingly poignant accounts of disasters whose names live in infamy: Chernobyl, Bhopal, Exxon Valdez, Three Mile Island, Love Canal, Minamata and others. And with these, the extraordinary and inspirational stories of the countless men and women who fought bravely to protect the communities and environments at risk."

Dow hires private security firm to spy on Bhopal activists. New documentary, Bhopali (trailer.)

RadioLab program Fritz Haber saved a billion people with synthetic fertilizer but also created chemical weapons (audio).

The Environment and World History edited by Edmund Burke (UCSC), Kenneth Pomeranz. ***

Global Environmental History / I.G. Simmons Simmons, I. G. (Ian Gordon), 1937- Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2008 McH Stacks - GF13 .S56 2008 Link

A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations by Clive Ponting 1991 McH Stacks GF75 .P66 1993. Great overview.

Natures Past : the environment and human history / Paolo Squatriti, editor Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c2007 McH Stacks - GF13 .N38 2007 Link

Environment and Empire (UK) / William Beinart and Lotte Hughes Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2007 McH Stacks - GF551 .B45 2007

Late Victorian Holocausts By Mike Davis

The Nature of Cities / edited by Andrew C. Isenberg Rochester, NY : University of Rochester Press, 2006 McH Stacks - HT123 .N35 2006 Contents

Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Donald Worster S&E Stacks QH540.8.W67 1994

Major Problems in American Environmental History : documents and essays / edited by Carolyn Merchant Boston : Houghton Mifflin, c2005 McH Stacks - HC110.E5 M3 2005 Outline and study questions, plus links to other sources

The Vulnerable Planet : a short economic history of the environment / John Bellamy Foster S&E Stacks - GE140 .F68 1999

American Environmentalism : readings in conservation history / edited by Roderick Frazier Nash. S&E Stacks S930.N36 1990

The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler looks at how gender has structured culture of domination. Her new book rethinks the economy: The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating a Caring Economics Link

Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City By Greg Grandin. (Includes excerpt and audio interview with author).

Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12 Peter Linebaugh.

Nikolay Vavilov collected more seeds, tubers and fruits from around the world than any other person in history. Yet the plant explorer, who endeavored to end famine, starved to death in a gulag, and his colleagues starved in the Siege of Stalingrad protecting the seeds. Gary Paul Nabhan, an ethnobiologist, conservationist, farmer and writer, chronicled Vavilov's life in Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine. Nikolay Vavilov, the Indiana Jones of Botany Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine (audio interview) Gary Paul Nabhan reflects on What is the Relevance of Vavilov in the Year 2010?:Link. This seed ark carries on his work.

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century by Peter Pringle audio interview.

Elizabeth Gilbert is known for her memoirs “Eat, Pray, Love”. But she dives into the world of late 18th and 19th century science to write her first novel in 13 years, “The Signature of All Things.” The novel also brings the reader into the world of botanical exploration.

American History

The Environment: A History of the Idea by Paul Warde, Libby Robin and Sverker Sörlin — World War II was an age of terrible environmental destruction. The years immediately following, the authors argue, brought about an awakening of the concept of "the environment" in people, along with an understanding that we need to address the modern-day emergencies of biodiversity loss, pollution, resource extraction and climate change. 12/18

Presidents Who Shaped the U.S. Food System (for Better and for Worse) 2/18 see Food.

How ‘Freeway Revolts’ Helped Create the People’s Environmental Law 6/19 see Environmental Justice.

1964 Wilderness Act and colorful people who led up to it.

Introduction to Environmental History, other http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/environment-courses/ MIT online] courses.

Adam Rome’s “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation” (review with some history).

Counterculture Green : the Whole earth catalog and American environmentalism Author: Andrew G Kirk, University Press of Kansas, 2007. S&Engr Library GE197 .K58 2007.

EARTH DAY 1970: THE TEACH-IN THAT MADE THE GREEN GENERATION Speaker(s): Adam Rome University of Delaware (short video)

Brownfields are abandoned industrial hazardous waste sites, the most infamous is Love Canal, another site, which helped spark the third wave of the American eco-movement. CA railroads are offering land for development. Now, these are an important aspect of environmental justice.

Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America by Richard White at Stanford video)

The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Studies in Environment and History) by Adam Rome

The National Parks is Ken Burns' excellent PBS series that contains much info on pioneering environmentalists such as Muir. All online for free link

Changes in the Land by William Cronon was long the central text in the Core course, a pioneering work in eco-history, and it it still the best explanation of how we got where we are. These excerpts (requires course login) documents how Native Americans related to nature, and what happened when the market was introduced. Ch. 8 is the summary/conclusion. He was also wrote "Trouble with Wilderness," which set off a lively debate, which concludes here.

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan

Atomic America by Todd Tucker. On January 3, 1961, nuclear reactor SL-1 exploded in rural Idaho, spreading radioactive contamination over thousands of acres and killing three men: John Byrnes, Richard McKinley, and Richard Legg. The Army blamed "human error" and a sordid love triangle. Though it has been overshadowed by the accident at Three Mile Island, SL-1 is the only fatal nuclear reactor incident in American history, and it holds serious lessons for a nation poised to embrace nuclear energy once again. See also Schlosser's Command and Control.

Douglas Brinkley, who recently spoke at UCSC, is a professor of history at Rice University and is one of the leading American historians on our times. Brinkley’s most recent books include “The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom,” “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America” (2009)(review and excerpt) and the New York Times best-seller “The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast” (video of talk)(2006), which was the recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy prize and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Down to Earth: Nature's Role in American History by Ted Steinberg.

Patricia Limerick (Cowell '72, American studies Ph.D. from Yale), is the chairof the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she is also a professor of environmental studies and history. She is the author of Desert Passages, The Legacy of Conquest, Something in the Soil, and A Ditch in Time.

Food of a Younger Land by Mark Kurlansky Slate review see also video talk.

When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales Of Environmental by Devra Davis (discussion notes) Davis confronts the public triumphs and private failures of her lifelong battle against environmental pollution. By turns impassioned and analytic, she documents the shocking toll of a public-health disaster—300,000 deaths a year in the U.S. and Europe from the effects of pollution—and asks why we remain silent. She shows how environmental toxins contribute to a broad spectrum of human diseases, including breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, asthma, and emphysema—all major killers—and in addition how these toxins affect the health and development of the heart and lungs, and even alter human reproductive capacity. But the battle against pollution is not just scientific. For Davis, it’s personal: pollution is what killed many in her family and forced the others, survivors of the 1948 smog emergency in Donora, Pennsylvania, to live out their lives with damaged health. She vividly describes that episode and also makes startling revelations about how the deaths from the London smog of 1952 were falsely attributed to influenza; how the oil companies and auto manufacturers fought for decades to keep lead in gasoline, while knowing it caused brain damage; behind-the-scenes accounts of the battle to recognize breast cancer as a major killer; and many other battles. When Smoke Ran Like Water makes a devastating case that our approaches to public health need to change.

California History

(Amazon search)

The Dreamt Land: Chasing Water and Dust Across California by Mark Arax, audio interview 6/19 see also CA Water history.

California Environmental History bibliography.

Trees in Paradise: A California History By Jared Farmer review audio interview.

The King of California This meticulous narrative of the rise of the cotton magnate James G. Boswell begins in the nineteen-twenties, when his family was driven from Georgia by boll-weevil infestations and brought its plantation ways to California's San Joaquin Valley. Not to be defeated by nature again, the Boswells leveed and dammed Tulare Lake, the largest body of fresh water west of the Mississippi, to the point of extinction. In its six-hundred-square-mile basin they grew cotton, while in Los Angeles office towers they built one of the country's largest agricultural operations, swallowing small farms and multimillion-dollar subsidies with equal vigor. Arax and Wartzman strive for evenhandedness but acknowledge the costs of Big Ag—such as evaporation ponds with selenium levels so high that ducks are born with corkscrewed beaks and no eyes, and the recurrent "hundred-year floods," stubborn attempts by the old lake to reassert itself.

Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath by Rick Wartzman.

Assembling California by John McPhee "takes readers on an intensive geological tour of California... looks at the conjectural science of earthquake prediction and gives an account of a recent San Francisco quake. His leisurely excavation meanders from Mexican explorer Juan Bautista de Anza's settlement of San Francisco in 1776 to 1850s gold-mining camps to the summit of Mount Everest, made of marine limestone lifted from a shelf that once divided India and Tibet. With this volume McPhee concludes his Annals of the Former World series, which he began with Basin and Range (1980).

Towers of Gold is about Isaias Hellman, who was California’s premier financier in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a man whose financial acumen catapulted the state into the modern era and laid the groundwork for one of the world’s most dynamic economies... Hellman was both a builder and financier, a major investor and promoter of eight industries that shaped California—banking, transportation, education, land development, water, electricity, oil, and wine.

Beasts of the Field: A Narrative History of California Farmworkers, 1769-1913 by Richard Steven Street Amazon

Mining California: An Ecological History by Andrew C. Isenberg (see course reader)

The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area by Richard Walker

A history of California counties.

Californiahistory.com is absolutely devoted to the history of California. General and more difficult to search for details about one place.

Links to popular California history sites (e.g., railroads, museums)

History of the county of Los Angeles (not just the city--the entire county)

Land of Sunshine : an environmental history of metropolitan Los Angeles Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, c2005 McH Stacks - GF504.C2 L36 2005

History and nostalgia, for historic minded.

"Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century" is a story of the largest public works project in US history. audio interview.

Bodie's Gold: Tall Tales & True History From a California Mining Town, Marguerite Sprague, College Eight '82 University of Nevada Press, 2003

Ruler and Rebels: A People’s History of Early California, 1769 – 1901, by Larry Shoup, focuses on the dramatic but little known stories of early California history, written from the point of view of rank and file working people.

San Francisco: digital site, Solnit's Infinite City (atlas). More books.

Native Americans (see also Native American page)

Charles Mann, author of 1491(book exploration on how Native Americans used the land) has also written about interactions between colonists and Native peoples.

Another account of megafauna extinctions

Nature and the environment in pre-Columbian American life Kowtko, Stacy Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006 McH Stacks - E98.S67 K69 2006

Local History

UCSC organic gardening history, extensive oral history

Leftmost City by Domhoff includes environmental activism in the city of Santa Cruz.

The unnatural history of UC Santa Cruz / editor, Jeff Arnett Publisher Santa Cruz, Calif. : University of California, Santa Cruz, c2007McH Ref LD781.S52 U56 2007 LIB USE ONLY Media Center DVD5174

Denzil R. Verardo, Porter '70, Jennie Verardo, Merrill '70 Napa Valley: From Golden Fields to Purple Harvest, Windsor Publications Inc., 1986 Restless Paradise: Santa Cruz County, An Illustrated History, Windsor Publications Inc., 1987

== Histories of Environmental Movement == (See also Eco-Elders)

Earth Days PBS documentary. 2010 trailer **** Excellent.

"A Fierce Green Fire" video documentery traces the history of the modern environmental movement, chronicling dramatic battles like the Sierra Club's fight against dams in the Grand Canyon, Greenpeace's campaign to save whales and recent efforts to combat climate change. San Francisco-based director Mark Kitchell, who also made the Academy Award-nominated "Berkeley in the Sixties," (audio interview).

David Brower 1st Executive Director of the Sierra Club, he had a significant impact on green history in the US. Frequently compared to John Muir, Brower was the executive director of the Sierra Club, founded Friends of the Earth, and helped secure passage of the Wilderness Act, among other key achievements Video biography Monumental can be seen on PBS. (short excerpt). An earlier biographical video is For Earth's Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower and is also the name of a book of his essays. Brower is the subject of the classic biography Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee. One of his last interviews (video) tells us all we need to know, including the role of corporations. New bio: David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement author interview

Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University and author of several books including The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America. author interview, review. see Egan big burn below.

Adam Rome’s “The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-in Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation” (review with some history).

Slideshow of the American Environmental Movement.

Environmental History timeline.

1964 Wilderness Act and colorful people who led up to it.

The fight for Storm King, a historic and precedent-setting campaign to save the Hudson River (Riverkeeper, Clearwater sloop and Pete Seeger). (text and audio).

Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement (1993) Review of Gottlieb book that tells alternative history of the environmental movement.

American Environmentalism: The U.S. Environmental Movement, 1970-1990 / edited by Riley E. Dunlap and Angela G. Mertig. Published Philadelphia : Taylor & Francis, c1992 (provides a succinct conventional overview of U.S. environmental movement in introductory chapter)

Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental Movement, Island Press; Revised Edition, 2003.

Something new under the sun : an environmental history of the twentieth-century world by John Robert McNeill New York : W.W. Norton & Co., ©2000. S&E reserves GF13 .M39 2000

Nature and the environment in twentieth-century American life / Brian Black Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006 McH Stacks - GF503 .B54 2006 Link.

From Counterculture to Cyberculture : Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Author: Fred Turner, University of Chicago Press, 2006. QA76.9.C66 T875 2006 Google book

Counterculture Green : the Whole earth catalog and American environmentalism Author: Andrew G Kirk, University Press of Kansas, 2007. S&Engr Library GE197 .K58 2007.

Nature and the environment in nineteenth-century American life / Brian Black Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 2006 McH Stacks - GF503 .B53 2006

California Environmental History bibliography

US Environmental History bibliography.

One of the early debates about the environment was between Preservationists such as John Muir and Conservationists such as Gifford Pinchot is explored in the video The Wilderness Idea, which can be found at McHenry Library (ask for VT2197) Discussion of the evolution of the term "conservation" See also "The Value of a Varmit " Ch 13 in Nature's Economy

Essay on Rachel Carson's influence.

The legendary naturalist Louis Agassiz was much loved by Americans in his time, but today, Agassiz has a mixed legacy. Host Steve Curwood talks with author and Indiana University English professor Christoph Irmscher about his new biography, “Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science.” (audio)